Integration Testing Using Jenkins (Part 1)

So for the last week or so, I’ve been tasked at CoreDial with adding our own set of integration testing now that we’re moving to a more formal deployment method using chef. After much pestering of questions to thehar of Lookout Mobile Security and with help of Google, #chef and jhansche in #jenkins I’ve finally got a nice clean proof of concept that we can evaluate and likely deploy.

I’ll come back later with another article on my installation issues with jenkins and the solutions that I solved (nothing too terribly complicated), but what I wanted to blog about was the two types of tests that I’ve been focusing on and was able to finally solve.

First, I wanted to simply get a working test going in jenkins since I’d never used it before and needed a minimum viable product to look at. Based on a recommendation from thehar a couple weeks ago, I looked at foodcritic, got that working, and with their instructions, was able to get that integrated for my first automated test in jenkins.

The main problem I had was really getting an environment path variable set so that I could execute a ruby shell (#!/usr/bin/env rvm-shell 1.9.3, in the foodcritic instructions). After some searching, I came across a hint (sorry, I’ve misplaced the link) that stated I needed to add source /etc/profile to the bottom of my /etc/default/jenkins file, which worked marvellously to get the command I was trying to run to go. (Note that I installed on Ubuntu 12.04 for this test.)

(Prior to that, I installed rvm and then ran the multi-user instructions to get ruby 1.9.3 installed. I also installed foodcritic via gem install foodcritic which depends on ruby 1.9.2+.)

Having created my first job, I filled in the Git information to connect to my git server. I ran into a few issues there, and needed to create a new .ssh directory in /var/lib/jenkins/.ssh/ (/var/lib/jenkins is the $HOME directory of jenkins). I then placed the appropriate authentication keys in the directory, but was still having issues with connecting to the server. It ended up being that I needed to add a config file to the .ssh directory with the following contents:

After adding this, then I could set the repository URL to git@coredial-git:chef-repo.git and the branch specifier to something like */feature/ENG-* in order to test all our engineering testing branches. I then setup Poll SCM with polling schedule */5 * * * * (I set to */1 at first for testing, and will likely increase this further, or add a post-commit hook to git.)

The actual command I’m running in the Execute Shell section looks like this: